ANAHEIM, Calif.  Detroit Red Wings coach Mike Babcock woke up Wednesday morning and was still bitter about how Game 3 ended.

"I have a hard time," he said after a short practice at Honda Center, site of Thursday night's Game 4 against the Anaheim Ducks, "with the fact that when you get two and they get two, how the game is not still going on."

Marian Hossa scored with 1:04 to go in Game 3, but referee Brad Watson had lost sight of the puck and blown the play dead, so no goal for the Wings, and instead they had to swallow a 2-1 loss that mirrored where they are in the best-of-seven second-round series. The Wings are 7-17 they've trailed a series 2-1.

The Ducks, who have won five of the last six playoff games against the Wings dating to the 2007 Western Conference finals, conceded they got lucky in Game 3, in which the Wings outshot them 18-3 the last 20 minutes.

"I think so, for sure," Ducks winger Teemu Selanne said. "I don't think anybody is happy with how we played in the third period. It seems to me that every time when we start to play it safe and are just backing up, we're going to have problems. The best defense is offense, and you can't really change your style and your game plan, and I think we changed too much in the third period — they got the momentum going, and yeah, it was lucky. The referee, he didn't see the puck and made the whistle, and that was our luck."

The Wings pulled Chris Osgood at 1:26 and loaded the ice with their top players. The play was behind Anaheim's net when Ducks defenseman Scott Niedermayer turned the puck over, and Johan Franzen whacked it into the crease, behind Jonas Hiller. The puck slid toward the left goal post across the blue paint when Hossa dove and sent the puck over the goal line. Hiller never froze the puck, but Watson lost track of it from his vantage point towards the far corner.

E.J. McGuire, series manager and spokesman for officials, defended the call, saying that, "the official was down along the goal line. He was moving forward toward the net to try to get a look at where the puck was. When he couldn't see the puck, all referees' instructions are to blow the whistle and blow the play dead. A combination of the black puck and the black pants may have been a factor. But when he didn't see the puck, he blew the whistle."

The puck was clearly in the blue paint when Hossa poked it, but McGuire said Watson, "didn't make a mistake. In hindsight, if he had a slow-motion camera to review it, he may not have (blown the whistle). He did what all officials are instructed to do: Blow the whistle when they don't see the puck. And he didn't see the puck. It's an emotional game. He wanted to explain to the players on the ice, as he saw it, the puck was out of sight and he blew the whistle. The assumption was that the puck was covered."

It was non-reviewable, leaving the Wings to look to their strong third period as a reason to be hopeful they'll swing this series their way tonight.

"We've just got to stay patient, keep wearing their D out," Hossa said. "Just keep doing the same thing. We believe we play a strong game. We feel we are doing a better job getting at them. We just have to keep grinding in their zone. We lost the last two games by one goal, and both could have gone in a different direction. It's so tight. We just have to make sure we score one more next game."

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